The Importance of Being Bonkers

In one corner of the walled garden, at Charleston in East Sussex, just behind the apple trees, drunken bumblebees hovered greedily over some overblown pink roses and then lumbered on to feast on wisteria blossoms for their next course, before finally settling on peony nectar for dessert. Up above, puffy boxing glove clouds swept across the sky, and below, in the pond, corpulent goldfish swam lazily about as I sat down on a stone bench with Mark Divall, the gardener in residence, to talk flowers. "Of course they were artists, and this garden was created, like Giverny, so they could paint the flowers in it. And when they weren't painting flowers, they were busy covering the entire house with their designs. You'll see what I mean when you go inside."

Oh yes, I saw exactly what Mark meant the minute I walked through the front door. The artists in question, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, who were part of the famously libidinous and louche Bloomsbury group in London in the '20s and '30s, had, with their wild, exuberant sense of color and design, transformed a perfectly ordinary old farmhouse into a living, breathing work of art. A voluptuous nude, loosely based on a painting by Delacroix, reclines across the side of the bath; the dining room walls are hand stenciled in a geometric silver and charcoal pattern (by Duncan); the round tabletop is painted with soft green and coral swirls of color (by Vanessa); and a pottery light fixture, suspended above by multicolored beaded wires, resembles nothing more than an upside-down colander. Taking their cue from Post-Impressionism, Cubism, and the flamboyance of the Ballets Russes, both artists had been determined to escape, visually and in the way they lived, the dark, dreary, uptight constrictions of the late-Victorian era they grew up in.

And boy did they ever succeed.

At the top of the stairs, the first room I entered was furnished with a narrow bed with a paisley cover, its headboard decorated with a masklike face reminiscent of one of those strange-looking ladies in Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Dressed in a billowing skirt that looked as though it might be made from the same fabric as the curtains, wearing dangly turquoise-and-gold earrings, a large woman—a guide—greeted me eagerly and launched into an explanation of this bizarre figure. "He's Morpheus, the god of dreams, and who better to have watching over you as you nod off at night!" Who indeed . . . And then she rattled on, informing me that John Maynard Keynes used to stay in this room when he needed a break from trying to revive the wheezing British economy; that he used to weed the gravel paths in the garden with his penknife; and that he instituted something called Charleston time, which was one hour ahead of real time, confusing everybody in the house.

But the things my new friend didn't tell me about the Charlestonians and their many guests are even more fascinating. Where to begin? Our hostess, Vanessa Bell, was married to Clive Bell and they had two sons—so far so boring. However, Clive preferred spending time with his mistress and was rarely around, so Vanessa fell in love with Duncan Grant, who then moved into the house, where they lived—and painted—together until the day she died, almost fifty years later. The only problem with this otherwise idyllic arrangement was that Grant was resolutely homosexual—Keynes was one of his many lovers—but that certainly didn't stop him from having a daughter with Vanessa. The baby was named Angelica, and so angelic was she that when another of Grant's lovers, David Garnett, visited Charleston to see the newborn girl, he told her proud parents that one day he'd marry her. And guess what. He did.

What's with the English? Why are they so gloriously—and creatively—loopy? I think we have to begin with the idea that the English honestly believe that being called eccentric is a compliment. Sensible people in duller countries regard outrageous behavior as strange, whereas in England it is seen as entertaining and enviable. Associated in the English mind with tolerance, liberty, and a refusal to kowtow to power, unconventional antics, wit, satire, and "taking the piss out of people" with an inflated sense of their own importance, putting a spoke in the system—all add a vital dash of glitter and humor to the otherwise all-too-serious business of life.

This summer I headed back to England, my childhood home, in search of some of the places and people who best reflect this wonderful aspect of the English psyche. But where exactly would I find the roots of this peculiar, iconoclastic breed—and could this explain some of the more riotous eruptions of the English influence on taste and style today?

Having begun the journey at Charleston, the next day I moved on to nearby Sissinghurst, another, equally beautiful country house. In 1922, Vanessa Bell's sister, Virginia Woolf, met Vita Sackville-West, who had been born into one of England's oldest and grandest families. At the time, Vita was married to Harold Nicolson, a British diplomat, and together, in the '30s, they created a garden at their house, Sissinghurst Castle, that in the years since has become a mecca for horticulturists, garden lovers, and hordes of enthusiastic lesbians from all over the world. (Don't be perplexed by the last category—you'll soon find out why.) I was taken there as a child and remember being bowled over by the combination of the rosy pink Elizabethan bricks of the castle and the romantic, slightly overgrown series of garden "rooms" that Vita had surrounded it with. Their grandson, Adam Nicolson, lives there now with his family, and having met him a couple of times, I had the New York chutzpah to e-mail him and ask myself over for tea. A true English gentleman, Adam promptly e-mailed back and said, politely if not truthfully, that nothing would please him more.

Sissinghurst is not so much a castle as the ruins of an Elizabethan house. All that remains of the enormous medieval pile is the facade, a tower (where Vita had her study), two sides of the moat, part of the stables, and a cottage. "Ah, there you are," Adam said, emerging from a side door. "It's not quite raining yet, so let's sit outside." It wasn't quite sunning yet either, so I hung on tight to my jacket, while he went inside to organize tea, before we settled down to talk about his grandmother and Virginia Woolf. Not unlike when discussing the domestic situation at Charleston, it's hard to know where to begin.

Vita and Harold adored each other and had two sons—so far so boring. But she had another, far more passionate side to her character that was entirely bound up with women, which is where Virginia Woolf (and a string of other ladies) comes into the picture. Adam sat back in his chair, gave the dog a satisfying scratch behind its ears, and tried to explain his granny's love affairs—probably not an easy topic for anyone, unless of course you happen to be a certain kind of English person. "The truth is that she was positively Byronic in her girl use," he cheerfully admitted. First there was Rosamund, after that Violet (Vita used to get her kicks by dressing up as a man and sauntering down Bond Street with Violet, smoking and being called Sir by the newsboys), and then Virginia, not to mention all those others whose names have long been forgotten. None of this mattered, though—partly because Harold, too, had affairs (with men), but much more importantly because they remained devoted to each other until the day she died in 1962.

After tea it was amazingly still "not quite raining," so Adam and I set off on a tour of the magical garden his grandmother had created more than eighty years ago. One of Vita's ideas, which has since been copied and turned into a bit of a gardening cliché, was to plant one "room" of her garden entirely in white flowers. Enclosed by box hedges, flamboyant white irises, blowsy peonies touched with the merest blush of pink, and delphiniums almost as tall as Adam had been carefully arranged, as in a group photograph, so that the taller members of the party stood at the back, allowing the smaller ones to shine in the foreground.

"You must look at these azaleas," Adam said, pointing to some pink flowering bushes. "Vita bought them with the money from the Heinemann Prize for literature. When I won the same prize a few years ago, I bought a Subaru, which tells you what a dull, bourgeois life I lead!"

The antics of those free spirits who dance through life doing just what they please may be amusing to read about, but what about the pain they cause their nearest and dearest? "Absolutely," said Adam. "I've always thought eccentricity is just about the ego and grim flamboyance. Everybody who doesn't know them loves them—from a distance. But everyone who knows them well distrusts them."

And yet, whatever havoc Vita and Virginia's love affair may have wreaked in their families (not much, as it turned out—their husbands couldn't have been more understanding, and the two couples remained close friends), it did inspire Virginia Woolf's most fascinating novel, Orlando. When Karl Lagerfeld was once asked to name his favorite character in literature, the world's best-read couturier snapped back, without hesitation, "Orlando!" Mais bien sûr. An androgynous time-traveler, born into one of England's great families in the sixteenth century, brought up as heir to their palatial house and estate, Orlando swoops across the world and through the centuries, eventually turning into a woman by the time the book comes to an end nearly four hundred years later, in 1928. Which so happened to be the year of its publication. In a letter to Vita, Virginia Woolf wrote, "[I] dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words . . . on a clean sheet: Orlando: A Biography. No sooner had I done this than my body was flooded with rapture and my brain with ideas. . . . But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita. . . ."

Yes, why don't we suppose just that? Vita was born at Knole, the house that had been in her family since the sixteenth century and that, as the only child of her father, Baron Sackville, she would have inherited—if only she had been a boy. And no amount of strolling down Bond Street dressed up as a man could change that. The loss of Knole was to haunt her for the rest of her life, but it was a loss that was partly redeemed by Sissinghurst and partly by Orlando. As Vita's son and Adam's father, Nigel Nicolson, wrote, "the novel identified her with Knole for ever. Virginia by her genius had provided Vita with a unique consolation for having been born a girl, for her exclusion from her inheritance. . . . The book, for her, was not simply a brilliant masque or pageant. It was a memorial mass."

Growing up in London, I was too late for Bloomsbury but just in time to be swept up in a whole new shock wave of English iconoclasm. The inhabitants of Charleston and Sissinghurst had all belonged to that trust-funded upper echelon of British society who didn't really need to work for a living. There were always servants around to cook, clean, and look after the children, allowing their employers to devote their beautiful minds and bodies to literature and art and, of course, love affairs. But everything changed in the '60s and '70s as the class system began to crumble—not a moment too soon—and people from the bottom of the pile like the photographer David Bailey, The Beatles, David Hockney, and such designers as Ossie Clark broke down the gates of English privilege. With the pill, Vita's Byronic behavior became the norm (although I suppose birth control was one thing she didn't have to worry about), and drugs were served as casually as a glass of champagne. As a teenager, I used to hang around the King's Road in Chelsea, where my favorite shop was called Granny Takes a Trip (I once spotted Mick Jagger there buying a T-shirt covered in silver stars); I had my hair cut into a geometric bob by Vidal Sassoon (or at least one of his snake-hipped assistants); and I kept on shortening my skirts until one day my mother pointed out, "Your belt is the same width as the length of your skirt." Yes, Mum, that's the idea. Dresses were made of diaphanous chiffon, so bras became a thing of the past, and when the Stones played in Hyde Park, I seem to recall that Brian Jones was wearing the identical see-through blouse covered in psychedelic swirls that I'd bought the week before.

Even snobby old geezers such as the royal photographer Cecil Beaton were unable to resist Mick's androgynous sensuality and became embarrassingly besotted with sex, drugs, and rock and roll—just like the rest of us. Beaton wrote breathlessly in his diary in 1967, "At 10:15 they appeared. Mick, in a gold-brocade coat with tight coffee-colored trousers, was vellum-white of face . . . and so huge of mouth that it was quite indecent." Yeah, that's the whole idea, you silly old fool.

But there was one designer who always burned more brightly than any of the other stars in this wild and stylish firmament. With her green hair, outsized jewelry made of Gaudí-esque bits of broken mirrors, and most of all her dazzling, multi-colored patterned fabrics, Zandra Rhodes, like Alexander McQueen in the '90s, was in a class all her own. With the advent of punk, both Rhodes and Vivienne Westwood—who once said, "I was messianic about punk, seeing if one could put a spoke in the system"—elevated this down-and-dirty street movement into high fashion. Westwood went for bicycle chains, razor blades, bondage gear, and spiked dog collars, while Rhodes was more decorous with a pink-and-black jersey collection—slashed, studded, and emblazoned with beaded silver safety pins—that took the whole of London by storm. And forty years later, she has lost none of her creative fire, as I discovered when I met her for dinner in her Schiaparelli-pink, parrot-green, and Matisse-blue palazzo on Bermondsey Street in London.

The tropical color scheme extended from the walls, across the floor in huge undulating waves, and out onto the terrace, where we sat sipping our drinks, surrounded by a jungle of gardenia bushes, palm trees, and climbing vines. No longer green, Zandra's hair was now fluorescent pink: "I know, I always used to have it green, but then I went to China so it had to be pink." But of course. Back inside, the doorbell suddenly rang, "Oh, that'll be Philip." As in Philip Treacy, the man behind the extravaganzas perched on the heads of seemingly every other guest at that recent royal wedding. (And let's not forget that the bride wore a dress designed by Sarah Burton, who took over Alexander McQueen's atelier after his suicide last year.) The first hat that Philip ever designed was a twisted birdcage which ended up on the cover of British Vogue, and since then he's done everything from art directing part of Grace Jones's 2009 “Hurricane” tour to working with the then eighty-six-year-old Dowager Duchess of Devonshire to create a hat incorporating an enormous Fabergé sapphire that had been in her family for over a century. "Englishness is all about openness to individuality," he said as we sat down to dinner. "I make hats for very conservative English women who think [the hats] are perfectly normal." Which presumably would include the gigantic pink IUD of a hat that Princess Beatrice wore to her cousin's wedding. Philip laughed. "Oh it's all my fault. I put it on her." But Beatrice—bless her—chose to celebrate that age-old English devotion to individuality by keeping it there.

Alexander McQueen was, of course, the quintessence of English eccentricity, anarchy—and genius. Here's a tiny sampling of what I saw earlier this year at "Savage Beauty," a retrospective of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: a corset with an aluminum animal spine running up its back, a dress covered in a waterfall of shimmering razor clam shells, a billowing rococo ball gown made of pink and mauve flowers (real ones), a perfectly tailored bodysuit with taxidermied crocodile heads on the shoulders (mouths open), platform shoes with vertiginous heels that resemble giant sequined armadillos, and a leather molded "bodycase," the nipples, belly button, and pudenda perfectly delineated, which extended seamlessly upward to tightly encase the head with only a slit left open for the eyes.

But don't think for a moment that McQueen was only about sartorial sedition. He was trained at Anderson & Sheppard, Savile Row's poshest bespoke tailor, where he mastered the art of cutting and tailoring—and where he allegedly sewed a profane message into the lining of one of Prince Charles's coats. Like Picasso, he was aware that you have to know the rules before you can shatter them. And it was this meticulous training that was on full display in my favorite piece in the whole show: an exquisite coat composed entirely of gold-painted duck feathers that fitted the model's body as only couture can, paired with an ethereal silk tulle skirt embroidered with gold thread. As I was gazing in slack-jawed amazement at the feather coat, I thought of another similarly inspired Brit called Jemmy Hirst, an eighteenth-century gentleman who was in the habit of going to the races dressed, according to The English Eccentrics, by Edith Sitwell, in a "glossy, shining waistcoat, made of drakes' feathers, from the pockets of which, when making bets, he would draw bank notes, made by himself."

McQueen burst onto the scene with his graduate show in 1992, entitled "Jack the Ripper Stalks His Victims," signing each piece with a stitched-in lock of hair. Perhaps he had been inspired by the late English Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington, who lived with the German artist Max Ernst and who served their house­guests omelets seasoned and stuffed with hair that she'd snipped off their heads at night while they slept. And talking of Surrealism and food, let's not forget Heston Blumenthal, the brilliant and iconoclastic English chef who is to cuisine what McQueen was to design. Blumenthal once thought it might be fun to create an edible skeleton, which became known as Hestonstein's Monster. Fried calf's brains snuggled up inside the skull, the bones were crispy deep-fried eel's skin and were stuffed with marrow—a dish you can imagine McQueen devouring, round midnight, after the triumph of one of his darkly gothic collections.

Alexander, Jemmy, Leonora, Vita, Heston . . . they seem like kindred souls to me, part of a culture as alive now as it was in 1690 when William Temple observed, "We have more humour because every man follows his own, and takes a pleasure, perhaps a pride, in showing it." McQueen himself claimed, "As a place for inspiration, Britain is the best in the world. You're inspired by the anarchy in the country." But as he knew better than anybody, being eccentric isn't just for fun; in the right hands—and minds—it becomes art.

Photographs by Cathrine Wessel

Courtesy of Comme des Garçons

Rei Kawakubo—the luminary behind the Japanese label Comme des Garçons—may have pioneered this slick six-floor shop, but the offerings extend way beyond her own brand. There are intricately draped Lanvin gowns, gorgeous renditions of everyday household goods from Labour and Wait, and jewelry cast in the shape of otherworldly bugs. Not only can Daphne Guinness be spotted in the changing rooms, but her clothing line, Daphne, is a collaboration with Dover Street Market (17-18 Dover St.; 20-7518-0680).